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3. Totalization and Organized Loneliness: The Origins of Totalitarianism
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29 3 Totalization and Organized Loneliness The Origins of Totalitarianism Totalitarian domination, like tyranny, bears the germs of its own destruction. —Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism was an answer to one of the fundamental questions of her historical moment: how does totalitarianism find its life and its endurance within the human community? Arendt’s post–World War II analysis assumed that we had not seen the last of totalitarian regimes. Communication in dark times must account for the darkness of totalitarianism that lives within manic efforts at control, possession, and totalization of the Other.1 Totalitarianism lives in an unrestrained view of expansion that dehumanizes, excludes, disenfranchises , and eliminates the autonomy of the Other. Arendt begins her investigation with phenomenological sensitivities, attending to the notion of “origins” in the emergence of totalitarianism.2 Her phenomenological education yields important political insight as she offers a form of genetic phenomenological investigation that discloses the origins of totalitarianism, revealing this phenomenon as much more than a form of spontaneous combustion. Arendt’s understanding of origins is analogous to Edmund Husserl’s discussion of genetic phenomenology, which he lays out in The Crisis of 30 Totalization and Organized Loneliness European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Genetic phenomenology examines the multifaceted layering of ideas, traditions, and insights and how they tend to give structure to a given temporal rendition of an idea or commitment. This layering of totalitarian origins works within the spirit of possession and totalization. The “thing itself” for Arendt is the effort to control the world in such a fashion that the Other does not have an opportunity to participate in and shape public space.3 The fundamental practices of totalitarianism rest with its origins, which revolve around possession, conquest, and denial of the Other’s right to shape and influence public space. The final objective of totalitarianism is directing, stabilizing, and changing a given social space in opposition to the marginalized Other. Totalitarianism has numerous facets, but its defining characteristic is closing the door of the public sphere, which hurts, maims, and kills those excluded from public participation. Domination of an individual or even a group is a penultimate outcome, with the ultimate objective total control of the public sphere. There is a reason Jürgen Habermas and Seyla Benhabib, celebrated proponents of discourse ethics and participation in the public sphere, cite the work of Arendt.4 The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951 and considered by many to be Arendt’s first major work, was supplemented with another essay in 1958 titled “Ideology and Terror.”5 The principal dates of writing correspond to the end of World War II to 1949. The events of that era were defined in the public mind by the prosecution of those involved in totalitarian governments and with the verdicts at Nuremberg rendered in 1946. The dark cloud of totalitarianism was salient in the public imagination; World War II did not extinguish this apprehension, and neither did Senator Joseph McCarthy’s campaign against supposed communist sympathizers. Totalitarianism lives by the fuel of unquenched desire that finds no limits, boundaries, or restraints in the face of the Other. It sees no neighbor, only land, person, or power that can and therefore should be possessed. The Story: The Origins of Totalitarianism At first blush, the hermeneutic entrance into this particular work of Arendt seems to be anti-Semitism. Arendt quickly states, however, that her quest is even more fundamental than anti-Semitism; she understands anti-Semitism as but one way to shore up a totalitarian regime. Arendt does not want the two terms conflated (anti-Semitism and totalitarianism ). As is Arendt’s custom, she begins with the common and then quickly unfolds a journey of increasing complexity and texture. Her objective is to move us beyond the “natural attitude,” which assumes that empirical evidence of a given idea or action is the same as a phenomenological level of meaning and understanding. For instance, one can observe the [18.206.185.68] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 10:44 GMT) 31 Totalization and Organized Loneliness interaction of two locals within a given community and describe their behavior in empirical detail without coming close to the meaningfulness of their phenomenological exchange with one another. Arendt distinguishes anti-Semitism from hostility between “two conflicting creeds,” with anti-Semitism seeking to displace another completely from the public sphere. Arendt starts with the claim that anti-Semitism began as a political method in the West in...